1. Field of the invention
The present invention relates to wireless communications, and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for monitoring scheduling information in a wireless communication system.
2. Related Art
Long term evolution (LTE) based on 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) technical specification (TS) release 8 is a promising next-generation mobile communication standard.
As disclosed in 3GPP TS 36.211 V8.7.0 (2009-05) “Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA); Physical Channels and Modulation (Release 8)”, a physical channel of the LTE can be classified into a downlink channel, i.e., a physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH) and a physical downlink control channel (PDCCH), and an uplink channel, i.e., a physical uplink shared channel (PUSCH) and a physical uplink control channel (PUCCH).
The PDCCH is a control channel for carrying a downlink resource assignment and an uplink resource assignment. Blind decoding is used to receive the PDCCH. A user equipment (UE) does not know when and whether the PDCCH is received. The UE detects its PDCCH by monitoring whether the PDCCH is received in a specific region.
Meanwhile, 3GPP LTE-advanced (A) which is an evolution of 3GPP LTE is under development. Examples of techniques employed in the 3GPP LTE-A include carrier aggregation and multiple input multiple output (MIMO) supporting four or more antenna ports. The carrier aggregation and the MIMO technique are for massive data processing.
A PDCCH structure currently used in 3GPP LTE may not be suitable for the massive data processing and newly introduced techniques.